While many speech synthesis systems based on deep neural networks are thoroughly evaluated and released for free use in English, models for languages with far less active speakers like German are scarcely trained and most often not published for common use. This work covers specific challenges in training text to speech models for the German language, including dataset selection and data preprocessing, and presents the training process for multiple models of an end-to-end text to speech system based on a combination of Tacotron 2 and Multi- Band MelGAN. All model compositions were evaluated against the mean opinion score, which revealed comparable results to models in literature that are trained and evaluated on English datasets. In addition, empirical analyses identified distinct aspects influencing the quality of such systems, based on subjective user experience. All trained models are released for public use.

Kaum ein Aspekt der digitalen Transformation wird bis heute so intensiv diskutiert, wie das Phänomen der „Plattformökonomie“, der Wirkungsweise der Geschäftsmodelle der großen Tech-Unternehmen wie Google, Facebook oder Amazon. Die daraus erwachsenen Konsequenzen greifen tief in die wirtschaftlichen Ökosphären ein, Plattformmechanismen haben sich inzwischen aber auch als gesellschaftspolitischer Faktor etabliert, insbesondere bei der Nachrichtenverbreitung und der politischen Meinungsbildung. Plattformen sorgen für mehr Effizienz in der Distribution, auf den Produktmärkten wie auch bei der Informationsbereitstellung, aber gleichzeitig eben auch für mehr Konzentration und weniger Ausgewogenheit. Sie haben die Eigenschaft, den Wettbewerb in einem Angebots-Monopol zu absorbieren. Ihr Handlungsprinzip lässt sich dabei durchaus als parasitär beschreiben, mit weitreichenden Folgen für Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft.

Citizen science allows involving interested citizen in the entire research process in science. In the past, various citizen science projects have been performed in different research fields, especially in human medicine. We conducted a rapid scoping review to determine which citizen projects in human medicine already used software-based systems to engage citizens in the research process. Furthermore, we analysed which of the software-systems are publicly available, especially in the field of rare diseases, how citizens can participate using those tools and whether the usability was rated by the participants. To get insights for our project “SelEe (Seltene Erkrankungen bürgerwissenschaftlich erforschen)”, which is a citizen science project in rare diseases funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), we aimed to identify projects in this research area. We searched PubMed for articles between 2011 and 2021 and performed a title- and abstract screening, as well as a full-text screening. Finally, 12 studies were identified in different research areas like public health, genetic research and infectious diseases. We could not identify any study directly associated with rare diseases. None of the studies investigated usability of those systems. Furthermore, five publicly available citizen science software-systems were identified. Three of them are general systems that allow creating, operating, managing citizen science projects and including citizens in the research process. In further investigations, we will check and compare these systems, if they are appropriate for use in our SelEe-project.

This paper presents the design and the results of a novel approach to predict air pollutants in urban environments. The objective is to create an artificial intelligence (AI)-based system to support planning actors in taking effective and adequate short-term measures against unfavourable air quality situations. In general, air quality in European cities has improved over the past decades. Nevertheless, reductions of the air pollutants particulate matter (PM), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ground-level ozone (O3), in particular, are essential to ensure the quality of life and a healthy life in cities. To forecast these air pollutants for the next 48 hours, a sequence-to-sequence encoder-decoder model with a recurrent neural network (RNN) was implemented. The model was trained with historic in situ air pollutant measurements, traffic and meteorological data. An evaluation of the prediction results against historical data shows high accordance with in situ measurements and implicate the system’s applicability and its great potential for high quality forecasts of air pollutants in urban environments by including real time weather forecast data.

Digitalization and Industry 4.0 have led organizations to adopt technology-driven approaches in various business segments. Integrated environments in organizations mandate the requirement of having in-depth knowledge of process, data and technology integration. This is also a requirement for organizations to develop towards sustainability, as data-driven business models can help to reduce waste and increase efficiency. Hence, universities have to provide skills in Industry 4.0 and in developing integrated systems across companies. Furthermore, online learning methods are required to prepare students for distributed teams in global industries. Consequently, you need a holistic approach to teach integrated thinking and working in distributed teams at the same time. The problems addressed by this paper are how to teach complex and heterogeneous aspects of Industry 4.0 concepts and how to integrate data-driven business processes. The paper describes didactic solutions with reduced complexity in a fictitious company to understand interrelationships between business segments in end-to-end processes. A virtual teaching concept encourages the exchange between students in distributed teams. Empirical runs of the concept show that students develop own approaches, learn to estimate the complexity of integrated systems and develop practical skills to find suitable solutions in a value-adding network. 

This paper presents a way for the hypertext community to gain strength and contribute to other fields of research by joining forces. It discusses the challenges that need to be addressed with respect to geographically scattered students and scholars, interdisciplinary courses, and students with various foreknowledge. We propose the INTR/HT project, a platform that aims for bringing hypertext scholars and students together worldwide. The interdisciplinary approach fosters creativity in the context of hypertext and is valuable for educating and supporting the next generation of hypertext scholars and researchers.

Modern browsers, as we know them from the Web, are used to query and present a variety of different resources. This usually happens by traversing links (i.e., URIs) in hypertext documents. The creation of new links however, is impossible to ordinary users, because they usually are recipients, but not owners of the received resource. In this paper, we demonstrate a browser plugin called "Weblinks", which offers its users an additional and rich linking layer over the existing Web. This enhances the notion of links as strings (i.e., URIs) in today's Web context to links as rich objects (n-ary, unidirectional, or bidirectional), which can be created, traversed or shared by anyone using the Weblinks browser plugin.

Information retrieval systems support users in finding relevant information in data sets. List layouts are wide-spread, but spatial layouts are catching up. User studies that systematically show their benefits for users are missing. We report on a comparative between-subject study with 43 participants comparing a spatial layout with a list layout. One group performed a task with a system providing semantic visualization, and the other group performed the same task with a system without semantic visualization. The results show that the users of the spatial layout had significantly more interaction with the system in shorter time, with a slightly higher outcome and higher satisfaction.

Der Einsatz von Künstlicher Intelligenz und maschinellem Lernen verändern die Bedingungen für Mediaplanung nachhaltig. Das wirkt sich gerade auch auf das Daten basierte Programmatic Advertising aus.

Human Factors in Hypertext 2021 (HUMAN'21) is the 4th workshop in this series. It is sponsored by ACM SIGWEB and is associated to the ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2021, which took place between August 30th and September 2nd as a virtual event. HUMAN'21 took place on August 30th-the conference's workshop day. This year's workshop is held in a difficult time: the global Corona pandemic makes attending meetings or traveling risky for our health. It almost seems as a contradiction to the 2019 ACM Hypertext motto "tear down the wall". However, today's digital media enables us to communicate over distance or even attend larger meetings online. This also opens the question about the role of hypertext as a medium for communication-a perfect topic match for the HUMAN workshop series, which has a user-centric focus on hypertext. The user-centric view not only includes user interfaces and interaction, but also discussions about hypertext application domains. Furthermore, the workshop raises the question of how original hypertext ideas (e.g., Doug Engelbart's "augmenting human intellect" or Frank Halasz' "hypertext as a medium for thinking and communication") can improve today's hypertext systems. As such, the HUMAN workshop also appreciates previous work on hypertext systems. In order to support this, we invite researchers to give demos of vintage hypertext systems. Last year we started with Norman Meyrowitz presenting Intermedia; this year Mark Anderson has been invited to give a demo of Microcosm.

Historically, there has been a tendency to consider hypertext as a type of system, perhaps characterised by provision of links or other structure to users. In this article, we consider hypertext as a method of inquiry, a way of viewing arbitrary systems. In this view, what are traditionally called “navigational hypertext systems” might be considered as information retrieval systems. This opens the hypertext field to various other types of systems that traditionally would not be considered as part of the field. The change of view enables a deeper fusion of human and machine. In particular, today's AI-based, intelligent systems open the demand of synthesising automation (on the machine's side) and augmentation (on the user's side). This article is not about researching AI systems; it is about extending the view of hypertext systems to synthesise augmentation and automation. We specifically apply this view to intelligent systems, asking the question about how hypertext can act as a common medium between human and machine, particularly for knowledge intensive tasks. We propose spatial hypertext as a medium that enables users to create cognitive maps. Along these lines, we provide examples from multiple projects and examine how these applications can be productive.

Software integration, especially in Open Source Software (OSS), suffers from technical debt as software evolves over time. Evolvement often ends in incompatibility issues like changed or removed APIs. The problems increase, as more components need to be integrated. This article analyzes common problems in OSS integration with respect to technical debt esp. externally induced technical debt and collects empirical evidence from the case study "AMiProSI" which combines different functions of various OSS systems to create a unified intranet solution. As part of the analysis, this paper discusses component-based development and its related dependencies and explains related technical debt (TD). By bringing down the individual problems in sub-categories of technical debt, we show what kind of TD has arisen in our case study AMiProSI and give advice on how this could be prevented in other projects.

Migraine is common in childhood, peaks in adolescents and persists into adulthood in at least 40% of patients. There is need for early interventions to improve the burden of disease and, if possible, reduce chronification. The aim of the project is to compare two types of ambulatory treatment strategies regarding their effect on headache days and quality of life in 6 to 11 year old children with migraine: 1) the routine care in pediatricians’ practices (intervention group A) and 2) a structured interdisciplinary multimodal intervention administered at social pediatric centers (intervention group B).

The increasing availability of audio data on the internet lead to a multitude of datasets for development and training of text to speech applications, based on neural networks. Highly differing quality of voice, low sampling rates, lack of text normalization and disadvantageous alignment of audio samples to corresponding transcript sentences still limit the performance of deep neural networks trained on this task. Additionally, data resources in languages like German are still very limited. We introduce the "HUI-Audio-Corpus-German", a large, open-source dataset for TTS engines, created with a processing pipeline, which produces high quality audio to transcription alignments and decreases manual effort needed for creation.

In this conceptual paper the authors provide a new approach for sales excellence in the digital era. Besides clarifying the objective and identifying the major dimensions of sales excellence in the context of digital transformation, the paper will particularly provide a concept for a proper sales excellence assessment as well as shed some light on the implications and costs of not following the sales excellence approach.

The increasing application of digital technologies is transforming sales considerably. However, it is unclear how sales can adapt properly – particularly from the B2B sales skills side. Despite the urgency of this matter, in-depth research on B2B sales skills in the digital era remains sparse. In this structured abstract, a new conceptual model for a more modern B2B skill set is thus developed in a cross-country study. As a preliminary result, most of the traditional sales skills are still required in future, but need to be complemented by intercultural as well as digital sales skills.